My experience with someone helping us in the house came from my childhood, as my parents were busy in ministry and language learning from the start and they always trained someone to clean and eventually prepare food for the family. Where we lived in Baramba, we were really "in the bush" - no big town nearby and you were allowed only one trip a month to your center to buy supplies. So living was very basic and the village was very dusty. So it was there my mom trained her first house help, which was only the beginning of a long list of house helpers she trained during their many years in Africa.
I remember one funny incident from those earlier years. Her helper was sweeping the floor, using one of those stiff-straw-put-together-and-tied native brooms You bent low when you used one. This fellow whom my mom had trained was sweeping the dust and dirt from the cement floor in our house and he came upon a small button that someone had dropped. He picked it up, looked it over, then swept underneath where he had found it - and carefully put the button back just as he had found it! Being from a bush village, he had probably seen stranger things than that in his white patron's house!!
Mother was a good trainer of house help. She herself made wonderful bread from scratch and that was one of the first things she taught her worker. There was no bakery in our village so no French bread available. Her helper taught other helpers through the years, and new missionaries often went to her help for their new house help to learn to make good bread. That is where Yusufu learned to make the good bread we had when you were children - from someone Mom had trained!
It is really amazing what these men (or girls) learned when they worked for one of us, coming as they did from a basic village lifestyle and had to learn our complicated tubabu ways! We were fortunate to have the same person (Yusufu) work for us for many many years. You kids all grew up with him. I could give him instructions in the early morning before I took off for class or the office and come home to a clean house, beautifully cooked meal and the wash on the line. What a treasure he was!
We had another house person who was not such a treasure. He was very much a tigi type - or "in charge person". He had worked for other people in the city of Ouagadougou and was actually listed as a cook. But he did agree to do housework as well. It was Christmas time that year and friends from Pennsylvania were visiting in Ouaga, so we invited them and the Luthers over for a big Christmas dinner. I had the table set, but no cook in sight. He was going to prepare the whole meal. One thing he starred in was preparing beautiful vegetable salad platters for a first course and I had planned to start with that. But no cook appeared! I finally hustled around in the kitchen and got the meal started while Dad went to the cook's house to see if he was sick or what had happened. He found him dead drunk! He was in no condition to even leave his room. let alone cook the Christmas day feast I had planned! That week Dad took him to the office in charge of house help in the city, but he turned around and insisted we had to pay back pay (which was all a lie - but we complied just to get rid of the guy)! A few weeks later we were robbed at night - a thief came in and stole all my lovely silver pieces on our buffet in the dining room, plus a hand painted lamp! What a loss when we got up that morning...we always suspected that he had something to do with that theft, but there was no way to prove it!
The man who replaced him was a Bobo, a Christian, and I never saw a more silent house worker. You never knew he was around. I spent hours in my office at the back of the house working on translation and lessons that year. I could never even hear him as he worked - he didn't bang, he didn't sing, he didn't have visiting friends to chat with. All was silence! But if he needed to ask me something, he would come quietly back to my office, and turn on the light switch - the light suddenly going on would distract me from my work, and there he was with his question! He was a faithful worker for us.
Some new missionaries did not want to have someone helping them in the house - they felt their privacy was being violated! I guess super private people ought to go somewhere else than West Africa. It is not a private life there! When we returned to Africa, the year after we retired, we went to San Pedro to work for a year in the Alliance guest house there. And we inherited someone else's house help. The inside helper was great and we worked very well together. he was a Christian, from the Alliance church, and he served us well our whole year there. The yard person was also a great guy - not a Christian and from a fisherman tribe down the coast, but he too was a great worker. We were blessed with good help that year.
The outside man was a real hero when a band of robbers came into the yard one night and proceeded to steal everything they could find. They jumped over the wall. When they tried to get into Dad's outside office, the guard prohibited them and so they beat him and tied him up while they broke into the office, took a large sum of money and also equipment and made off with it all. They also broke into the room of missionaries from another mission who were staying in our guest house. They wakened to these thugs entering their room, bright flashlights in their eyes! It was a terrible experience. They were new people from Togo and we later heard they just could not make it in Africa after that terrible start. Our car had been parked out back and the guard told the thieves we were not home so they did not even try to get into our room - we slept right through it all. Only to be wakened by the wounded guard after they had left. After that Dad had to build the surrounding wall higher on that Alliance guest compounr overlooking the ocean far below!
We always found that our house helpers allowed us to be fulltime in ministry and we tried to treat them all with courtesy and friendliness. We looked on them as "helpers" rather than "servants". And now we look forward to seeing some of those faithful people who worked for us on our Africa visit next week!
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